Some attention for your thoughts

Your personality creates its own worldview, or reality. You may have noticed that he uses your thoughts in order to do so. Now you have quite a lot of thoughts each day, thousands and thousands. It is quite impossible to uphold the belief that your thoughts are neutral and do not affect your experiences. When you are busy doing something, it is your thoughts which determine the way you feel at that moment. And when you think about a hundred times each day that some aspect of you is wrong or not acceptable, you can hardly maintain the idea that you are fully happy with yourself, nor that this idea will not be in some form expressed in your life and reactions. Same applies when for example you hate your boss. Each time you see or hear about this person or talk about him or her, this hate-thought is repeated, now you can rely on it that this will considerably stay in the way of any good contact. Etc.

It may even get as far as your becoming afraid of your own thoughts. You may experience this for example in stress situations. Your personality has turned a situation into a huge problem. Thoughts are raging through your mind, you cannot come up with answers that might work, and it all becomes a tiring vicious circle which is all but a pleasant experience. This too is not likely to remain unnoticed by other people.

Your thoughts are less spontaneous and uncontrollable as you may believe at first sight. They stem from your will to uphold a belief system, based on standards and values, where everything you perceive is interpreted against these. They are fuelled by anything you focus your awareness on, what you see or hear, what you rather not face, your fear to not think at all and then think of "anything", etc. So when you face the real source of your thoughts: your wish to uphold a worldview of your own, and no longer believe this to be a desirable goal, then the endless repetition of thoughts which upheld the promotion of this system are no longer useful, and this choice itself contains the promise of automatic decrease of the former thought system in power and intensity.

You may want to practice with this idea, for example by becoming aware of the thoughts that you have during activities you undertake for more than an hour on a given day. These activities are likely to be an important part of the worldview of your personality. Which thoughts are strengthened by the television programs you are watching, which ones through the contact with certain friends, which ones when you are working on your computer, which ones during your work, or during sporting activities. Also try to become aware of the thoughts that you are nót entertaining while doing this particular activity, which may for example lead to a more pleasant experience during sporting or working at your computer than during working hours.

Again, awareness is the key, not so much changing the way or things that you are thinking of. Your inner Self does not need thoughts, since it is an experience of Being. You will find that by repeating these little exercises as described above, you will become aware of the difference between your thoughts and "something" in you which perceives these thoughts. Thus you help yourself to make it easier to detach yourself from your thoughts and the feelings that accompany them, and no longer use them for identification and creating a self image or believe them to be a truth in themselves. You are not your thoughts.

By the way, your thoughts are not as private and unnoticed as your personality may want you to believe. Since the interpretations made by your personality are not neutral, they will always lead to certain feelings, which you in return will express, hide, talk about, think about etc. This not only takes a great amount of your mental energy available during the day, it also affects others. Other people will somehow notice your stress, when you talk about it, other people will be on the receiving end of the message, and your irritation will somehow express itself or will take away part of the attention span you otherwise would have used for other things. Thus you call forth reactions and feelings in other people, who may for example disagree with you, do not like it in return that you express your irritation, etc. They too will express this somehow, to you or others, which may lead in return to talking, compromising, adjusting etc. So this one interpretation of yours may spread like oil on water before you know it.

Now the good part about all this is, that each time you manage to let go of this vicious circle, this whole effect will be no more as well. Imagine the amount of energy and attention that is now available for other things! So do not underestimate the overall effect of what seems to be your one private interpretation.